2011 Book 22 - The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

I tell you, I've been on quite a roll this vacation and finished up my third book. The latest has been Alan Bradley's second book in his Flavia de Luce series The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag. Since this was an actual book that I read and not from my Kindle, I can provide you with the write-up from the back:

Flavia de Luce, a dangerously smart eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders, thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop's Lacey are over -- until beloved puppeteer Rupert Porson has his own strings sizzled in an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. But who'd do such a thing, and why? Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she's letting on? What about Porson's charming but erratic assistant? All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local contables can't solve -- without Flavia's help. But in getting so close to who's secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head?

I have to admit that I do enjoy a good mystery and the Flavia books seem to provide that in an Agatha Christie sort of way....if Agatha Christie wrote her main character to be a highly intelligent child with a passion for posion and a history of being tortured by her older sisters. I would recommend this book to folks if they wanted a light read with a little meat on its bones. The plot is pretty good and the character development is quite impressive. I look forward to getting the next in the series A Red Herring Without Mustard...